Giving it up for the ensemble of Broadway’s “Lysistrata Jones”

Posted by Mark Dundas Wood on December 26, 2011

Lysistrata Jones is the new college basketball / sexual extortion musical comedy. It’s adapted very loosely from Aristophanes by playwright Douglas Carter Beane and songwriter Lewis Flinn. (Actually “suggested by” or “inspired by” is a better way to put it than “adapted from.”) The show had a run off-Broadway last summer, staged in the actual gymnasium of the Judson Memorial Church. Recently it reopened at the Walter Kerr Theatre to a rave review from the New York Times.

I saw the show last Friday at a special matinee performance and had an enjoyable time. As many have observed, this musical is not as pointed as Aristophanes’ famous anti-war comedy Lysistrata. It has more in in common with the scads of raunchy coming-of-age film comedies that began with Porky’s and proceeded through American Pie and beyond. Some have also pointed out that the libretto—about cheerleaders who withhold sexual favors from the basketball team in order to incite them to win games—isn’t as literate and witty as some of Beane’s nonmusical plays (which include As Bees in Honey Drown and The Little Dog Laughed). That’s true, but the humor in Lysistrata Jones seems appropriate to the genre and to the characters Beane’s dealing with. And Beane’s dialogue isn’t entirely simple-minded: I don’t recall Porky’s quoting Walt Whitman and/or Emily Dickinson as Lysistrata Jones does.

Alex Wyse & LaQuet Sharnell

Patti Murin is fine in the title role, but what made Lysistrata Jones most impressive to me was its strong ensemble of players, performing under the direction of Dan Knechtges, who also choreographed. I especially liked big-voiced LaQuet Sharnell as one of the Lysistrata’s fellow cheerleaders, along with the very funny Alex Wyse, who plays a white, Jewish kid who finds bravado in Ebonics—but who eventually graduates from slang-spouting schlemiel status into mensch-hood. I hope to see more from both of these actors in the future.

Not sure how long Lysistrata Jones will remain on Broadway. It’s probably not the next Mamma Mia!. But I have a feeling it will be a title that will show up in all sorts of regional and college productions in the next few years. The one thing that could prevent that is the show’s tendency toward topical humor. In fact, Beane must be adding new lines to the script on a regular basis. There’s no way a joke about Kim Jong Il at Friday’s performance was in the show when it played at the Judson gym, or even when it first opened at the Kerr.